Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The Leftist-Islamic Alliance Against Freedom of Speech

Robert Spencer, a tireless defender of freedom and the freedom of speech against Islam, was attacked recently in the New York Daily News and charged with having "inspired" Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to go on his killing spree in July 2011. The writer, Nathan Lean, in his July 9th column, "Expose the Islamophobia industry," connects several other counter-jihadist writers with Breivik's actions, and lumps them all together as "untouchables" who ought to be ostracized.

The Islamophobia industry insists that it is not just a fringe minority who distort an otherwise peaceful faith. Instead, they point to the Koran and suggest that terrorists derive their world views from its messages. If that is so, these anti-Muslim agitators are guilty based on the logic of their own argument. After all, Breivik read and interpreted the writings of people like Spencer and [Pamela] Geller. He deciphered their diatribes much like Osama Bin Laden interpreted the Koran. Both men were compelled to act on the messages they digested.

It is doubtful that Lean has cracked open a Koran, or has heard of the Hadith, or The Reliance of the Traveler. For if he had any solid knowledge of Islam and its principal texts, he would grasp that these works do indeed sanction the violence of Muslim terrorists. He would understand that Spencer has every right to be an "Islamophobe," that is, someone who is fearful of Islam and especially of Sharia law. It is interesting to note that while Lean inveighs against Breivik, who murdered dozens of people, he does not mention the thousands of people killed by jihadists in virtually every country on earth. Moreover, he does not suggest that Breivik also was inspired by al-Qaida, in addition to a potpourri of other "Islamophobic" writers. About Spencer and his outspoken co-counter-jihadists, Lean concludes:

Society has a responsibility to counter these individuals with overwhelming overtures of pluralism — and to systematically push the fear-mongers out of public discourse.

Spencer replies:

The claim that I "inspired" the Norway mass murderer Breivik because he cited me in his "manifesto" has become a staple of Leftist and Islamic supremacist polemic against people who are trying to defend freedom against Sharia. But it founders on the facts: never mentioned is the fact that Breivik cited many, many people, including Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas Jefferson -- who are just three of the many who are never blamed for his murders.

Also swept under the rug is the fact that whether he is sane or not, Breivik's manifesto is actually quite ideologically incoherent -- so far was he from being a doctrinaire counter-jihadist that he wanted to aid Hamas and ally with jihad groups.

It probably has not escaped the notice of the more observant readers that the alliance of the Left and Islam reflects the same agitprop strategies, chief among is that when the Left's or Islam's policies fail, or produce disasters, or cause deaths, or provoke hostility among the electorate, blame for the failure is shifted elsewhere. When Obama's policies produce the opposite of his alleged goals, he blames Bush, when in fact Obama's policies are a continuation of Bush's soft-pedaled socialism. The difference between Bush's socialism and Obama's is that Bush's policies were founded on an ignorance of economics, or of reality; Obama's policies are intended to negate economics and remake reality.

When Muslims murder, torture, rape, go on rampages, or otherwise resort to violence anywhere in the world to enforce conformity to their ideology, their spokesmen in the West blame "extremists." But they never say that the "extremists" are wrong. The ideology is never at fault, only its finger-pointing "misunderstanders."

Thus, as Spencer points out in his Jihad Watch column, anyone who criticizes Islam is a "misunderstander" who spreads "lies" and "fabrications" and so on about the perils of Islam and can be quick-marched to the same camp with actual jihadists. Then a leap of logic is performed and Muslim violence can be blamed on criticism of Islam. The Left and Islamists "abhor" violence, express "regret" when violence occurs, and do not blame the perpetrators, but instead the "instigators" of the violence, that is, those who exercise their freedom of speech by pointing out the evils and fraud of Islam and the consistent violence its ideology encourages and promulgates. They cluck their tongues in public over the violence sanctioned by their ideology, but chastise anyone who says the violence is part and parcel of their ideology.

They must be "pushed out of public discourse." That is, shamed, humiliated, boycotted, mocked, picketed, and ultimately censored. The irony is that there is no "public discourse" about the nature of Islam and the crimes committed in its name. Nor does the Left and Islam wish there to be.

It is six of one, half a dozen of another. The Left and Islam both promote collectivism and universal submission and subjugation to them. Of course they are allies. With the help of its Muslim occupiers, France recently elected a blatant socialist. Has anyone in this country heard a single Muslim speak out against Obamacare? Has any British Muslim spoken out against Britain's welfare state? No? Why not? Because to oppose collectivism one must advocate individual rights. It is individual rights that the Left and Islam wish to extinguish. They say: Control private property, or expropriate it, and it is extinguished.

In the fantasy universe of collectivists, violence is never the fault of the ideology, it is always the fault of anyone who resists submission to the ideology or criticizes it. For secular collectivists (or the Left), as with Islamists, the fundamental means to the end is force.

The correlation between and alliance of the Left and Islam are not contrived, "constructed," coincidental, or accidental. They are fundamental, natural, and inevitable. Marx and Mohammad have gone forth into the world, holding hands, fingering their beards as their feral and predatory intelligences survey the landscape before them. For example, Marxists, socialists, and other leftists wish to collectivize property. If the property is thus "owned" by the state, then no freedom of speech is possible (except illegally underground, or via samizdat) but the "freedom" to extol collectivism. If property is Islamized – that is, owned, or controlled by Muslims in a fully collectivized society governed by Sharia law (that is, Nazified), with nominal private ownership whose purpose and end are dictated by the state, or by the caliphate – then no freedom of speech is possible, either, except the "freedom" to parrot the party line of Mohammad. In either system, an individual who dares question the ideology gets swatted very quickly. That is what Gulags and chopping blocks and bomb detonators are for.

Then there is the "purgatory" or halfway point between the full collectivization by either ideology, a gray world in which freedom of speech is not expressly forbidden by law, but exists at the arbitrary whim or politically correct discretion of politicians or the judiciary. This is the situation in the United States. Brand any criticism of Islam as "Islamophobic" and the critics are conveniently diagnosed with dementia and committed to Antonio Salieri's Vienna loony bin, the papers signed by people like Nathan Lean. Or by Hillary Clinton and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the United Nations, or Barack Obama, or by Tony Blair and the Prince of Wales, and The New York Times.

There has, however, been an unfortunate consequence of all of this. It is now possible to shut down almost any contemporary political debate by blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism of Islam and the anti-Muslim prejudice of the far-right. This is perhaps best expressed by the appearance on the scene of terms like “Islamophobic racism” – a further extension of the concept of Islamophobia – which conflate the idea of “race” (the way a person is born) with religion (a set of ideas passed on in the home, the school and the community).

Bloodworth is one of those leftists (and The Independent is notoriously leftist) who frown on private property but uphold freedom of speech, meaning, for all practical purposes, that one should be free to speak on any subject, so long as it's standing up at the bottom of a public swimming pool (there are no private swimming pools, except in the backyards of the political elite) and one's words have no untoward or deleterious social consequences. Bloodworth is correct to claim that the inclusion of the idea of racism is illegitimate, because Islamophobia has nothing to do with race. It is a "set of ideas," however, he presumably has not examined very closely. He still harbors a distaste for the term, without examining the root meaning of "phobia," either, which means a fear of something.

A phobia can be an unreasoning fear of things like mice or spiders or cigarette smoke or the number thirteen, or it can be a rational response to a nemesis, such as being knifed or stoned or raped or stalked by a fellow wanting to be propelled in a fireball to Paradise and seventy-two virgins. The desire to speak one's peace, or to preserve one's freedom, he insinuates but does not elaborate, is not a form of bigotry.

On the surface, the Left and Islam indulge in and promulgate the reversal of cause and effect. The mobs of Occupy Wall Street go on a rampage because they do not have the wealth of their victims. Muslims murder infidels because they are disrespectful non-Muslims who enjoy more freedom. But the reversal is only superficial. In fact, causality plays no role in the violence sanctioned by the Left and Islam. In criminal law, the causality of crime is not regarded as a legitimate, rational motive. Motives are not on trial. Murder, property theft or destruction, or felonious assault in the name of an ideology, are not admissible as rational norms of behavior. Only actions are deemed worthy of judgment.

Leftists like Nathan Lean say – and they say it often – that one having something a criminal lacks because of "the system" has denied him that thing is the cause of the violence. The wealthy sui generis are the cause of the expropriation of their property. This illogic can be and has been extended to: The bourgeoisie must be eradicated because they are the bourgeoisie. Jews must be exterminated because they are Jews. Muslims say that if infidels don't have "religion" – their religion – then their lives are forfeit and they must be fitted with fetters and assessed for jizya or just gotten out of the way. Infidels must be conquered or killed because they are sui generis infidels.

If you are a blonde, blue-eyed Swedish woman, or a British school girl, or a red-headed German secretary, you deserve to be raped by a gang of ambitious, "morally superior" Muslims who want a taste of Paradise on earth before they turn into bomb-carriers. Islam grants Muslims dispensation for being in a hurry. If you are rich, or just moderately well-off with money in the bank in spite of paying confiscatory taxes wherever you turn, you deserve to be robbed and collectivized in the name of a fantasy society projected by the looters to miraculously evolve some time after your passing. The Left grants its activists in and out of government dispensation on the basis of need and the sui generis sainthood of a "have-not." For the Left and Islam, every action is forgivable, nothing is criminal.

The reversal of cause and effect is not causality at work, but rather the irrational and the anti-reason. Lighting a bonfire beneath a pile of iron ore is not going to produce an ounce of steel. Gagging anyone who speaks out against censorship is not going to acquit one of the crime of censorship, not unless some dhimmi American judge rules that "Islamophobia" does not qualify as "civil" or "public" discourse.

Pushing "Islamophobes" out of the "public discourse" is not going to stop Islamic jihad, stealth or violent. Muslims will only be encouraged to carry more signs saying "Free speech go to hell." Prohibiting the advocates of individual rights from criticizing socialist policies will only encourage wannabe beneficiaries of socialism to smash store windows, occupy private property, and shut or shout down forums on the price of liberty in the name of "freedom of speech."

And that, in a nutshell, is the symbiosis of the Left and Islam. Its fruit is totalitarianism. Ignore it at your peril.